


Before Earth

by raininshadows



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-15
Updated: 2016-10-15
Packaged: 2018-08-22 15:41:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8291249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raininshadows/pseuds/raininshadows
Summary: A few of Peridot's more memorable missions before Earth.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NicoleAnell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NicoleAnell/gifts).



> Happy Halloween! I hope you like this.

In retrospect, Peridot doesn’t remember many details from her time serving Yellow Diamond. One mission after another, fixing Kindergartens, plotting where they should be on new worlds, reading scans to determine whether a planet was worth trying to put a Kindergarten on, they all blurred together after a while. 

There were a few worlds that stood out, of course. 

Zarmina’s indigenous wildlife was putting up a surprisingly good resistance against the Gem Empire forces. It had its own Kindergarten, of course, but it had recently started producing subpar Gems - strangely small Beryls, unusually weak Quartzes, one Turquoise who'd come out missing an arm - so she’d been sent in to figure out what was wrong and fix it. All the signs indicated something gone wrong during the growth phase, and as expected, it turned out that the foundation layer was cracked through in several places. It was a relatively easy fix, just needing carefully applied vibration, but Peridot wound up spending several weeks there making sure everything worked as usual. There were more Quartzes there than she’d ever seen. Most of them just ignored her, as she’d expected. The other Peridots were interested in her news from Homeworld, and more than happy to tell her about Zarmina in exchange for information on the Diamond Authority’s courts. Peridot had dealt with planets with intelligent non-Gem inhabitants before, but something about Zarmina’s wildlife was interesting to her. 

Peridot never actually saw Caelictus in person, or even as more than a set of pictures and scans. It was a small terrestrial planet out in the Andromeda Galaxy, populated by animals of a variety she’d never seen anything like before. They weren’t quite like the Gems, because they didn’t have the same gem core they did - it was as if their entire bodies were their gems, like the organics. But they were made of glittering stone, like the Gems. Peridot marked that one down as a potential tributary planet, not a Kindergarten, indicating the unique wildlife as her reason. She never actually found out what happened to it, but she was sure her advice had been taken into account - it was, after all, the logical thing to do, and Yellow Diamond was nothing if not perfectly logical. 

She knew immediately that the Earth mission was going to be one of those memorable ones. She’d been to planets affected by the Rebellion before, and she’d been to planets populated by sentient organics, but Earth was the birthplace of the Rebellion. Even if nothing interesting happened, Earth was going to stand out just because of what it was.


End file.
